Saturday 29 January 2011 19.07 EST
First published on Saturday 29 January 2011 19.07 EST

What? You're staying in Klosters? How very downmarket. For a week each January, the swanky Swiss ski resort favoured by Prince Charles and George Osborne becomes a poor relation to Davos, the neighbouring Alpine venue for the World Economic Forum, where prices rocket into the stratosphere for anything from a matchbox-sized hotel room to a spaghetti bolognese. If you're in Klosters, you're a cheapskate.

There's a definite pecking order to the annual jamboree of global leaders. The creme de la creme of the world elite get a chopper in from Zurich airport. Mere chief executives of multinational companies arrive by limo. Meanwhile, charity leaders, religious figures, journalists and hoi polloi trundle up the mountain around icy hairpin bends in complementary shuttle buses.

With 2,500 of the world's elite in town – ranging from Dmitry Medvedev to José Carreras, the Google guys and Morgan Tsvangirai – you'd have thought the place would be a venue for lively debate. But in fact, the prevailing impression is consensus. Everybody's hoping the euro will survive, predicting the rise of Asian economic might, anxious to "risk-proof" the financial system against future shocks, eulogising green energy and enthusing about social networking. Oh, and nearly everybody hates bankers – except the bankers themselves, who are getting increasingly antsy.

JP Morgan's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, complained bitterly last week that, as governments tighten regulations and politicians rage against bonuses, many people wanted bankers just to "bend down and accept it". Standard Chartered's Peter Sands suggested that financial regulators were insisting on the equivalent of ever tighter seatbelts on aircraft – which are usually irrelevant if a plane actually crashes.

The boss of one of Britain's top law firms moaned that "no single human" could understand the totality of the regulatory structure any longer. And Goldman Sachs's president, Gary Cohn, opined sagely, as if unstoppable extraterrestrial forces were at work, that a crackdown on reckless behaviour by banks would force financiers to establish more unregulated hedge funds. Regrettably, there might be no option but "regulatory arbitrage" in search of laissez-faire structures, said Cohn, sounding for all the world as if he had no influence over the matter.

It was left to Nicolas Sarkozy to body-slam the money men with a ferocious assault on Anglo-Saxon finance which, he said, defied common sense and amounted to "a game of Russian roulette with our money, our savings". What, the French president asked, is the point of having rules if bankers simply make it their lives' missions to circumvent them? He reminded bankers that although they may be frustrated by slimmer profits and pay packets, the actions of a reckless financial industry had left "tens of millions of people unemployed who were in no way to blame and who paid for everything".

There are many reminders here in Davos that the global financial crisis and economic slowdown have hastened a realignment in global power. George Osborne talked of a "two- or three-speed recovery" with emerging markets bouncing back much faster than the west.

The French president used Davos to push his case for putting India, an African nation and a Latin American country on the UN security council. He asked why the dollar should remain the world's dominant currency and questioned whether structures established after the second world war were fit for the 21st century.

A poll commissioned by CNBC found that 48% feel the west is in decline, while only 27% think it isn't. And Medvedev declared that responsibility for global development now lies with the rapidly growing "Bric" economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China – shortly to be joined by South Africa, turning the grouping into "Brics".

In the bars and restaurants of Davos, those spheres of broadening influence were evident last week. A Russian cocktail night hosted by Medvedev's Skolkovo Foundation drew a big crowd, as did the Africa dinner hosted by Kofi Annan, Jacob Zuma and Tsvangirai. The South African delegation was easily spotted: they proudly wore scarves in the colours of their national flag everywhere.

The global head of the McKinsey management consultancy, Dominic Barton, observed that as these rapidly developing nations grew in stature, further economic shocks and price bubbles were inevitable: "I can't think of a country that got to a GDP-per-capita level of $10,000 without some sort of financial crisis along the way."

In a moment of relative frankness, Dimon accepted the need for a new financial order, predicting that in hundreds of years' time, people would look back at economic management in 2011 and view it with the same amazement that we look back on doctors "bleeding" patients in ill-fated efforts to cure ailments. Amazingly, he doesn't seem to believe that his own industry's game, memorably characterised by Sarkozy as "pass the parcel where everyone who passes the parcel makes a profit", will be viewed with the same disdain.